Slovakia, what's the story, Mum?

In 1968 Katja Dreyer's mother fled her native Czechoslovakia. After the Soviet Union suddenly invaded her homeland, putting an end to the Prague Spring, she sought her fortune in West Germany.   

In her practice, Katja Dreyer digs into the past to better understand our layered present. Now, she ventures into her mother's story for the first time. But relating to her Slovak and Slavic identity turns out to be no easy task. Her mother cannot (or doesn’t want to?) remember everything, and Dreyer never learned her mother's language.  

Fortunately, she met Peter Savel in her search, a half-Slovak, half-Brussels dancer. As a queer boy, his mother sent him to Slovakian folk dance, to ‘straighten him out’ a bit. Now he is passing his knowledge on to Katja. His language, his dance, his hands and feet all form a kind of portal to her own history. Together they sketch all the parallel storylines taking place during and after ‘socialism with a friendly face’. In a collage-like series of danced and spoken poems lies a slumbering question: what do we pass on to the next generation?  

• Katja Dreyer is a theatremaker, dancer, teacher, and performer. She has worked with Nico Boon, Mette Edvardsen, Begüm Erciyas, and David Weber Krebs, and studied Intercultural Theatre Making at the HKU, commuting between the Netherlands and Belgium, before settling in Brussels in 2005. In the intervening years she has become a permanent fixture at Kaaitheater, where she has shown Ophelia Comes to Brooklyn and Cry Me a River. The quest for the source.